On Thursday 19th October I visited the Sydney edition of the Enterprise Java forum at the MLC Center. From what I understand EJA forums have been running in Melbourne for longer, and there’s an event down there monthly, whereas they are just establishing themselves in Sydney, and the events are only quarterly. The Melbourne program was slightly more extensive, but Sydney’s program was pretty busy too, with six speakers spread over half a day.
Firstly, my notes on the speakers:
Jim Webber, Geurilla SOA — was engaging and humourous, made a good case for his expertise and expounded a sensible rationale for adopting SOA. The main thrust of his argument was that Web Services alone are robust enough to provide the benefits of SOA, without having to rely on vendor solutions and the lock-in they entail. A useful analogy for this proposition was comparing the telecommunications network to the internet, where the internet has won because of its ignorance and simplicity, compared to the complex routing and domain knowledge of the telecomms networks.
Peter Evans-Greenwood, The Boundaryless Organisation — Peter’s speech was largely strategic, and I suspect was over the heads of most of the mainly technical attendees. Certainly from a purely Java perspective there was little of value. Probably it was just the wrong forum for this type of talk.
Ben Alex, Next-Gen POJO Architecture — Ben’s points were largely that while architecture has improved in recent years, it could be better with some simple tweaks that can vastly improve the success of new systems. Firstly he wants us to get the terminology right, some of the patterns being used commonly are being incorrectly labelled. More importantly, the idea of “domain driven design”, with a better separation of concerns and a longer shelf life was promoted. He referenced the book “Domain Driven Design” several times, and its been on my reading list for a while, so I should get to it soon.
Paul Scott-Murphy, Architecting Event Driven Systems — I’d mostly seen this talk before (at a TIBCO event), but with some future projects in mind, this was particularly interesting. Paul demonstrated TIBCO products and how they can help create an event driven system, using Confluence and the events it generates as an example.
Cristina Cifuentes, Java on Wireless Sensor Devices — interesting from a hobby technology point of view.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Pragmatic Clustering — Mike spoke about Tangosol, and lessons learned from Atlassian’s efforts in clustering Confluence. Most of all it was interesting to see his thought process in reaching the decision to use Tangosol… they started off not knowing much about it, and so we got to learn from the mistakes they made along the way. I wish I’d taken better notes during this (update: the presentation is here).
As for the rest of the event. The networking opportunities seemed limited at first glance. There were a couple of consulting companies, and the bulk of the audience was from the Reserve Bank of Australia. But aside from these there wasn’t much on offer. As with all technical talks the crowd was a little shy and geeky, but ready to chat easily enough. Also, the food was great!
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